


you and me in a crowd, alone

by ninemoons42



Series: Alone, Together [2]
Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Alternate Universe - Not Human, First Dates, Holding Hands, Kissing, M/M, Past Abuse, Past Underage Sex, Second Chances, sharing food
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-05
Updated: 2013-09-05
Packaged: 2017-12-25 17:29:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/955796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charles has been around for a long, long, <i>long</i> time, and he's experienced and inexperienced all at once.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you and me in a crowd, alone

**Author's Note:**

> Beta and enabling by Afrocurl.

_He wakes up, and almost regrets it: the sheet clings to his skin, and that unpleasantly, rank as the smell that fills his every breath and makes him want to clutch his stomach. Queasiness, resignation, and distaste: feelings no one should ever have to endure in and of themselves, much less mixed together in a roiling miasma._

_His head is spinning and he’s in pain, somewhere, nerves still too deadened by the previous night to be able to take care of himself properly._

_Savagely he bites at his lower lip. Thoughts spinning around in his head, a greasy loop fraught with despair: what is the point of binding up these thoughtless wounds inflicted so heedlessly and so recklessly? What is the point of rinsing off sweat and blood and saliva and everything else when they are always smeared back into him?_

_There are no tears in him; bitterly he wishes he could still mourn, but he’s seen too much and he’s lived too long, and these things that he suffers night after night are nowhere near new nor exciting._

_Desire is tiresome and pleasure is a chore, and he would rather have death, but that’s something denied the likes of him._

Charles wakes up.

He isn’t expecting the blankets piled over him, that he burrows gratefully into, hitching the edges up and curling in on himself until only his hands and his face remain uncovered.

He isn’t expecting the golden streams of sunlight - too warm and too luminous - he doesn’t have much of a sense of time, but he does know that morning has come and gone and passed him by.

Above all else, he isn’t expecting to wake up next to - 

Next to Erik.

He’s awake, and he’s here - _still_ here.

And so, incredibly, is Erik.

A memory stirs, rare for its warmth and its affection and the powerful need still wound into it after all this time: the man next to him, only a boy, trembling as he begged to be held down. 

He remembers himself, hot all over, mad to touch the boy’s smooth skin, to learn everything he could of him - brimfull of desire when he had never thought himself capable of such a thing. The feel of that boy’s body, opening up beneath him: the first time, the best time, shaking and heaving together towards the inexorable smash of orgasm.

Ten years, nothing but a moment to Charles himself, and the boy he’d been with then is the man sitting next to him now, and Erik’s eyes are shadowed and strange and still the same.

He’s loath to climb out of the heat clinging to his skin, but there’s a greater need in his nerves, no less powerful for all that it’s so gentle as to be insidious - Charles pries himself up from the sheets, raises a hand to Erik. 

And Erik doesn’t hesitate to meet him halfway. Overnight shadow on his skin, the same stubborn set to that jaw, thin-lipped mouth, parting so easily when Charles brushes a thumb against the soft seam.

Charles leans in, closer and closer, and he refuses to close his eyes. Even a blurred Erik is better than no Erik at all - the outlines of him, too near, the shades of him where the sunlight illuminates him and the shadows engulf him.

A whisper just before he makes contact: Erik says his name, reverently: “Charles.” And, a word that he should have worn out a thousand times over, these past few nights.

But Charles can’t get enough of the way Erik sighs, “Please.”

And it’s not a prayer, he hasn’t heard one of those in years. It’s a wish, and he’ll grant it, again and again, as many times as he hears it, for he can’t get enough of it.

So he brushes a kiss against Erik’s mouth, barely there - and then another, and another. All the while his hands clasp Erik’s shoulders, keep him in place.

Erik doesn’t fight him, but he does strain up into Charles’s grip, and Charles can feel not just those muscles but the rest of him as well. Erik wants to get closer, will fight to get closer.

Not now. Not yet. Charles wants, and it’s been a long time since he could feel that rush of molten lightning. Long years of drought, of thirst, of uselessly fleeting need. This is something else. This is heady and all-consuming. This is truth. This is desire.

And Charles never wants that desire to be gone, for he knows what it’s like to go without, and those had been days and nights of being cast aside on the rocky shores of petty encounters.

He’s not aware that he’s murmuring to Erik until he hears Erik’s response, rough burred words, bite of frustration around the edges: “Don’t tease me like this.”

“But this is what I want,” Charles says, and he shrugs off the covers, pulls Erik close. Erik clambers into his lap with a frown that Charles smooths away by licking a teasing line between his eyebrows. Erik tastes like sweat and like last night, like rough salt. “Will you deprive me of this, Erik?”

“I - you - ” And Erik’s words trail off. He looks gratified and needy all at once.

“You know what it feels like when you wait until you can’t take another breath,” Charles says, right against Erik’s gasping mouth. “You know how good it is when you break - and when _I_ break.”

“Yes.” A nearly soundless response.

“I won’t leave you,” Charles promises between darting kisses. Greedily, he bites into Erik’s lower lip, a sharp nip followed by a slow stroke of tongue. “You won’t be unfulfilled.”

He smiles, nods approval, when Erik grasps his upper arms; he takes a moment to admire those large hands, the strain and the shape of them. Erik’s fingertips stutter against Charles’s skin, shiver and skid over the sheen of sweat.

“Kiss me,” Charles says. “Kiss me like there’s something you want to tell me and you can’t use your words. Kiss me like the world’s ending - kiss me, Erik - ”

He watches Erik swallow back a groan, watches as that shudder makes its way down. Erik’s chest heaves, and that’s the last thing Charles knows, before Erik crashes into him.

Charles sighs and gives himself up to it: once Erik’s kiss was tentative and far too thoughtful.

Now Erik is experienced, now Erik is knowing, and this kiss is savage. No more hesitations. No more coyness. Just teeth and tongue and the ruthless combination of the two, drinking Charles in. No frontiers. 

He lets Erik bear him down into the covers, the two of them protecting each other even as they press against each other. Trapped between them is Erik’s erection, jumping and leaving slick trails behind on Charles’s skin. His own erection is hot and heavy between his legs, and the blood that rushes through his veins moves so painfully, so deliciously quickly.

He puts all of that from his mind.

He tastes Erik’s kiss: the hot metal just beneath the skin, the remains of last night’s wine - sweet enough almost to cloy, heavy on the tongue.

More. He wants more. He pulls at Erik. He doesn’t get the words out. Can’t get them out around Erik’s tongue. Charles whines, thin thready moan.

Erik obliges him: a quiet sob, a quick catch in the breath, and the kiss becomes predatory. Proprietary.

If Charles had the breath to scream he’d be filling the scant inches of sweat-slick space between them with a single word: “ _Yes._ ”

Screaming would mean ending this kiss, though, and that’s the farthest thing from Charles’s mind. He arches up. He’s long since out of breath. Erik won’t let him up. Erik won’t let him go.

And he doesn’t want to let go.

In the end it’s Erik who pulls away, chest heaving. High hot flush, splotched across cheekbone and throat and collar bone. His mouth is wet and red, swollen with use, obscene. 

Charles looks his fill, watches Erik’s irises shift color, again and again in the dimming light. What little is visible of them, anyway: Charles is looking up into an endless darkness, Erik’s pupils blown wide, and Charles wants to dive into that black and never ever come back up.

“Charles,” Erik says, after a moment. A long pause. 

Charles can see him gathering his words.

And now this, Charles thinks. He tamps down his disappointment. He turns away from the hollow darkness - secreted away, but last night he’d released it in a storm of words and there’s no forgetting it, now that they’re circling around to talk about it once again. There’d been a reason for the wine last night.

He couldn’t have told last night’s story stone cold sober. He’d needed something to hold on to - and he had managed to avoid breaking any of Erik’s wineglasses. A small consolation.

He’ll take all of those that he can get.

As he will this: Erik shifting to sit up, and tugging him along. He watches Erik rearrange the pillows and blankets into something else entirely, partly a wall to keep out the rest of the world, partly a nest for the two of them to share.

Charles watches as the last of the sunlight falls in a pale beam into Erik’s hand, watches him let that go in favor of pulling Charles close.

Maybe they can fight off the long, long night if they’re together, Charles thinks, and he can’t help but take a deep, steadying breath.

“I don’t intend to let you go, now you’ve come back.” Erik’s voice is resolute, like bedrock beneath the rough burr. “I - I just want to understand, Charles. You told me a strange story last night. There are parts of it that are almost unbelievable.”

“I am, in and of myself, something unbelievable,” Charles mutters. “I am, in and of myself, something _wrong_ , or so I’ve heard, over and over again.”

Out of the corner of his eye he sees Erik flinch.

He talks on. Something in him is being hollowed out with every word. A sharper pain, now that he has nothing to dull his own tongue with: he digs the wounds deeper, as he continues. “There are people out there who take absolute delight in condemnation. For them, hatred is a better thing, an easier thing. They cannot know anything, because they cannot understand anything, and happy they will be for the rest of their lives in such grinding darkness, like pigs wallowing in shit.”

Erik nods, once. Lines in his face, like a strange mirror of Charles’s own scars. “I wish I could say that I didn’t know how that worked.”

“Anyone who says that the world works in better ways is lying through their teeth,” Charles says.

“Yes.” A pause. “And you’ve been feeling this way for - ”

“For more years than anyone would care to count or believe.” Charles sighs. “And that’s where the part where I’m called wrong begins. Wrong, and so many other things. So many years, so few words - they all mean the same thing. I don’t know why I expected any better. The same fears, the same insults, the same ravings, over and over again.”

“What is the first thing that you remember?”

Charles closes his eyes, and whispers, “ _A god who lives on his fathers, who feeds on his mothers..._ There was a woman who had killed herself after her husband left her for another man. I held her hair away from her face as others poured wine onto her naked skin, washing away the sand. I wrapped each finger of her left hand in linen. I placed an amulet on her mons pubis: a bird with wings of gold and green. There was singing as she was sealed into a casket and then into her tomb, and the words of the song were carved into the wood and into the stone.”

“Charles?” This time Erik’s voice comes out as a quiet, startled whisper. “Did you look - the way you are now, in the time of the pharaohs?”

He opens his eyes; he takes Erik’s hand and kisses his knuckles, one after the other. “Yes. Perhaps a little younger.”

“So you do age.”

“Yes. I think. Very, very slowly. I still look much as I did now, after - ”

“- After five thousand years,” Erik says. Erik has gone pale, but he still sounds mostly composed, even with the slight trembling edge of disbelief in his words. “Charles. I need to ask you a question, and it’s likely to be offensive.”

“You couldn’t offend me, Erik,” Charles says. It’s even the truth. “You wouldn’t want to offend me.”

“I - yes.”

“Ask, Erik.”

“What are you exactly, Charles - you look human, you _feel_ human - are you human?”

Charles sighs, and keeps looking at Erik, and feels that darkness as it gnaws once again at his heart. “I don’t rightfully know. I know many things, but not this fact about myself - all I know is that I am mostly human. I bleed and bruise and breathe as you do. I’ve looked like this for so long. These things I know, and the rest is hidden to me.”

Silence falls around them. 

As he looks out the window, the last pink light of dusk fades into night, and the stars flit into the sky, distant lonely points of light.

“No,” Erik says, suddenly.

Charles blinks.

The sound of Erik’s swallow is loud in the silence. “There’s one thing that’s never been hidden to you.” 

It’s the truth, is the first thought in Charles’s mind: a thought only ten years old, a thought so young, but it’s not a new thought. 

He has walked through the millennia, and he has spent so many nights looking for something to hold on to in the world. He’s been wounded and he’s been hurt and he’d been silent all throughout, and perhaps, perhaps, there has always been a reward for him after all.

It only took him four thousand years or so to get that reward.

So Charles takes a deep breath - a true breath - he wipes the slate clean, and turns into Erik, whispering into the sweaty skin, tasting that clean salt on his mouth, wishing for more. “Maybe that’s true.”

“I know it’s true,” is Erik’s reply.

Charles smiles.

///

None of Erik’s clothes properly fit him, and that’s something Charles is fine with: he looks at himself in the tiny mirror in Erik’s bathroom, and raises an eyebrow at his bedraggled state, and he wouldn’t exchange anything for the world.

True that the shirt is too snug in the shoulders and too long in the sleeves; true that the jeans pinch around the waist, plus he has to roll the cuffs up several times. It doesn’t matter. This is what he wants. 

Well, this is part of what he wants.

Erik is no longer in the bedroom when Charles is finally satisfied with his hair, and for a moment he considers calling the other man back in. It seems that this place is perfectly Erik’s, is the right place for him. 

He picks his way past the made bed, past the plumped pillows. He hadn’t been watching where his leather jacket had landed when he’d thrown it off on the night they came back to this place - but now he can see that it landed in a pile of apparently clean shirts, and now there is something of Erik’s scent in the seams and the pockets of it. The jacket smells like Erik, like seawater, like the sunrise, and Charles pulls the collar up around his ears, the better to be surrounded, the better to be wrapped up and held and _safe_.

“Charles?”

“Coming,” he calls, and the sunlight fills in his footsteps as he turns on his heel, as he makes his way out of the house.

Erik is on the sidewalk, peering back in Charles’s direction, and he doesn’t smile when he sees Charles but there is something that moves in the lines of his face, something light, almost like a welcome.

Charles steps to Erik’s side, and when Erik sets off, he follows.

They’re so new to each other, so familiar to each other, that Charles can’t help but stare when his hand slides into Erik’s, when Erik squeezes his hand and doesn’t relinquish it, even as they walk up a slope and down a winding path to where the sun splashes and shatters on the waves in the distance.

Life is fleeting, Charles thinks, watching his feet and Erik’s.

That doesn’t mean that it has to be meaningless.

He smiles, and Erik bumps into him, companionably, and murmurs a question for his ears alone. There are people all around them, now, a growing crowd of morning-lit faces, but Charles simply side-steps everyone else without thinking.

“Is everything all right?” Erik asks.

He doesn’t ever want to let go of Erik’s hand; he wants to get closer, and he does, dodging around a girl in a diaphanous skirt and one in most of a linen suit.

“Better than all right,” he tells Erik.

He gets a kiss for that, brushed over his temple, a fleeting touch of fire that burns more hotly than the sun ever could.

It makes him shiver, makes him draw close, and Erik lets him lean in, never breaking stride, so Charles keeps walking with him.

The sun beats down on his shoulders and the wind lifts his hair, catches at bits of his sleeves, and Erik kisses him every time they have to stop at an intersection. Nothing ostentatious, everything spontaneous. Charles’s cheek, the corner of his mouth. Once Erik misses and the kiss lands in Charles’s hair.

Charles smiles, incredulous and he can’t hide it. A sweet shock. He’d fall to his knees if he could.

Breakfast: out of the sun, but they cannot escape the wind that riffles Erik’s hems, that runs playfully through Charles’s hair. The wind casts a faint hint of salt into their toast and their coffee and the fresh, cold berries in a bowl, resting on a bed of ice.

Erik offers him a bite of sausage, spicy spark on his tongue. 

Charles swallows and laughs and returns the favor by asking for a second dish of blackberries. He can’t help but be a tease; he kisses each glistening fruit before pressing it to Erik’s mouth, and Erik’s eyes are full of heat and of sweet warmth, as he smilingly partakes of cool dark flesh and syrupy sticky juice.

They’re still licking blackberries from their fingers long after they’ve left. Charles follows Erik up a narrow path: gentle, but they go higher with each step. The constant wind makes the little weeds in the sandy soil tremble, and when he stops, he’s looking at foaming waves, at the restless sea, far below. The water roars as it smashes into the patient rock, into the patient cliffs, glittering with marine wear and tear.

Sea below and sky above, and Charles looks at Erik, standing straight between the two. The question breaks free, involuntarily. “How are you real?”

“I should be asking you that question,” Erik says. Salt on his fingertips, and he rubs them into Charles’s skin, rough tiny circles. “I was sixteen, and you were my first, and in the morning you were gone. I thought you were a dream.”

“I didn’t want to leave you - I didn’t want to go.” Charles has to make himself meet Erik’s eyes. That part of the story is not one he wants to get into, not here, with that unimaginable fall just at their feet.

“Yes,” Erik says, simply. “You told me that.”

“Then you don’t believe me.”

“I do. Or at least I’m trying.” 

Charles looks away. He bites his lip, almost hard enough to draw blood.

Erik frowns, looks concerned, wraps Charles’s hands in his own. “You’ll have to be kind to me, Charles. You’ll have to give me time. It takes a moment for something like five thousand years to sink in.”

“You can just take me at my word.”

“I am. I do. It’s just difficult to understand.”

“And in trying to understand, do you want me to stay?”

Erik nods, once, looking grave. “More than anything. I don’t think I could bear it if we had a repeat of that night.”

“I don’t want to repeat it,” Charles says, quietly, but he puts all of his strength into it. “I don’t ever want to do it again - leave you, I mean.”

“Then don’t,” Erik says.

“It’s not that easy. Nothing is. Not even for me.”

“Then it won’t be. But we’ll stay together. We’ll do everything we can.”

Erik pauses, and Charles looks up at him. 

They look at each other, size each other up, on the cusp of together, on the edge of apart.

It’s Charles, bowed by the weight of the years, who breaks that silence: “No one has ever said anything like that to me.”

“And I’ve never said it to anyone,” Erik says. “Never had a reason to.”

“And yet you mean it.”

“I mean it, yes,” Erik says. He smiles, a little. The sun is bright on the affection in his eyes. “I can give you time to understand that, if you want.”

“Touché,” Charles murmurs. He tries to smile back. 

Erik nods, presses a chaste kiss to the corner of Charles’s mouth. “We’ll do everything we can,” he says again. 

“All right,” Charles says. “We. The two of us. Together.”

Erik doesn’t answer, at least not in words: he squeezes Charles’s hands again.

They stay until the sun becomes a punishment, hammering heat.

When they leave, they are firmly fastened together, hand and heart.


End file.
